'Mountainhead's Jason Schwartzman on perfecting phone acting for the film

I want to start by asking about Mountainhead itself, the big mansion that Super built

You know, since you're playing the character who had this monstrosity built

was there a specific design element or architectural detail that you felt really clued you into the character

That is such a great question. I've never been asked this question

I think that, yes, oddly enough, the house is built somewhat into the mountain

In the middle of the house, it's a seven-story home with a spiral staircase going all the way down to the bottom

And you can stand on the top floor and look all the way down. And that, without sounding cheesy, that spiral staircase seemed to become like a metaphor of the movie to me

And these characters like spiraling. And everything spiraling. And the fact that you can look down and see someone else down there

there's something about that shape that just became like the movie to me

I love those scenes where you watching everything play out on your phone just scrolling And I just want to know what the secret to good phone acting Because I felt like the way everyone was holding their phones felt very different Great question I appreciate that you asking great questions

Oh, great. Thank you. I've never really done too much, I realized until I did this movie, work with a phone

And Jesse Armstrong, you know, succession, a major part of succession in a way

are these characters and their phones and getting updates. and they communicate heavily with the phone

Jesse had a, I guess, a phone genius, Andre, who he brought on to this movie

And Andre gave us these phones that were directly connected to some kind of crazy computer

And we actually had the real fake footage coming onto our phones directly

Oh, so everything was exactly, like everything was practical. So if we got a message, you could hit message and it would be there

It's all happening sort of live. And Andre's sending, you know, all the things in on cue

But there were times when you know maybe I more of a different maybe I more of a scroller like that But then I look over and I see like that what Rami doing

So I'm like, you don't want to be different. You know, there's only so many ways you can ultimately look at a phone

I'm also intrigued because the turnaround time was so short on this movie

and I feel like already we're seeing elements of the film come to life

Like, for example, Google did its big IO event yesterday, and it's so AI-focused in a way that feels kind of like a precursor to what Tram is doing

So I want to know, what's it like to see this heightened reality start to come to life

and do you and your castmates kind of just go like, oh, this feels familiar, like, reach out to each other

Throughout the movie, Rami and Corey were constantly sending me headlines and

and the subtext was this is like one of the things we

get sent in our film at a certain point I would get you know just alerts

on my personal phone and it was I'm like is this is this my real

like I didn know what was like it was sometimes a little crazy you know and I but you know obviously Jesse taking it to an extreme and taking a real interesting look at it and perspective at it

But I definitely think it's like, it is crazy how quick, like, I don't think you could probably wait a year to put out this movie

I think that it would be, you know, it would be behind

You know, it's pretty nuts. Like, I mean, it's only been, I mean, we wrapped April 8th, and now it's May 21st

Yeah. Like, we were shooting it, and they said, yeah, it's coming out May 31st

And I said, yeah, that sounds right. I didn't know they meant this year

I thought they meant next year. I didn't. I mean, it's very crazy

But it was so fun to do because it makes everyone, everyone's working so hard to try to make this, you know, work for Jesse

And I love that feeling, like just like all hands on deck, just like we have to go, we have to finish

We hopefully can't mess up. This is a terrifying experience and I don't know that I'll ever recover